Dan Cole hadn’t seen his father in a year or more, but he knows where to find him: Down in that hollow where Springdale Cemetery sits, wedged between the rolling hills of Southern Indiana and downtown Madison. Philip Samuel Cole Jr. is buried next to his parents and his baby brother, three flat stones embedded under all that oak and poplar. About 100 feet away is Crooked Creek, where Dan’s father played as a boy. Not far beyond that is the Ohio River, where his dad left his legacy as a man.

But the legacy, it’s in trouble. So is the race. You know the race, don’t you? A few decades ago, that question needn’t have been asked. Who didn’t know the Madison Regatta? All those hydroplanes on Fourth of July weekend, skimming above the Ohio River at about 200 mph, out to the Milton-Madison Bridge and back again.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, with drivers in F-16 fighter jet cockpits racing hydroplanes powered by Vietnam-era Chinook helicopter engines, the regatta drew close to 100,000 spectators to this Indiana town of 13,000. In those days ABC broadcast “Wide World of Sports” live from the banks of the Ohio, Keith Jackson talking to the audience in that Southern drawl of his.

And then, it wasn’t. Luck was involved, all of it bad. The weather didn’t cooperate, keeping the spectators away by bringing too much rain in 2013 and ’16, and too much heat in 2012. That kid behind the wheel of the black Chevy Monte Carlo, plowing into the crowd and injuring 11 people before plunging into the Ohio River in 2006, he didn’t help either.

Last year the Madison Regatta drew 10,000 spectators, if that.

This is where Dan Cole comes in. See, his old man created the regatta. This was back in the 1950s and Phil Cole, this life force of nature, schemed and dreamed the event into existence. Now his son has been president of the regatta for three years, and Dan Cole isn’t sure there will be a fourth year — because he’s not sure that, in 2018, there will be a Madison Regatta.

“We live and die with gate admission,” Dan Cole says, and the buzzards are hovering. The regatta went into the red a few years ago and hasn’t climbed out yet. It still owes tens of thousands of dollars from 2016.

“If it isn't successful this year, it's over,” Cole says. “My dad started this event. I can't have it end under my watch as president.”

And so he went to the cemetery about a month ago. Dan Cole saw his dad two times a year when he was alive — Christmas and the regatta — and has visited his gravesite infrequently since pancreatitis killed him in 2006. But the regatta is coming. The buzzards are circling. And Dan Cole had a request.

Dad, I need your help.

* * *

Fans line the river banks during the Madison Regatta in Madison, In. July 6, 2014(Photo11: Provided by Dan Cole, James Crisp, special to the Louisville Courier-Journal)

No telling what Phil Cole would do if he were alive today, but he’d do something and it would be outrageous and it would probably work. It was Phil who told the lie that created the Madison Regatta — and who knows, maybe saved the town of Madison? — in the early 1950s.

Boat racing in Madison dates to the 1800s, when steamboat captains liquored up on Kentucky moonshine challenged each other to races on the Ohio at speeds reaching 10 mph. In 1929, the Mississippi Valley Power Boat Association began holding an annual race in Madison, but the Ohio River flood of 1937 — 385 dead, 1 million homeless, half of Louisville, Ky., submerged and martial law brought to Evansville — put it on pause. World War II brought the race to an end.

Enter Phil Cole, a lively sort who at various times in life was a congressional aide to former U.S. Rep. Earl Wilson of Bedford, PR man for Nevada casino magnate Bill Harrah and notorious IndyCar bad boy Salt Walther and a writer of cookbooks. And in 1950, Phil Cole was sports editor of the Madison Courier when he rallied a group of businessmen to get Madison back into the boat-racing business.

The sport was a hit in bigger cities like Detroit and Seattle, but organizers were struggling to make an honest living in smaller towns like Elizabeth City, N.C., and Polson, Mont., and Madison, Ind.

So Phil Cole told a lie.

The big money in hydroplane racing — the big crowds, in other words — came from points races. That required at least four race teams, several heats, and a finals. In 1954 the Madison Regatta had two teams coming from Detroit for a relaxing weekend of exhibitions. Those boys from Detroit didn’t want a points race, so Phil Cole told them: No points racing here.

What he didn’t tell them: Two other teams, both owned by hydroplane legend (and two-time Indy 500 driver) “Wild Bill” Cantrell, also were coming. Cole had Cantrell hide his boats at a boat shop in Louisville until race day, when he pulled into Madison and dropped his two hydroplanes, boasting World War II-era plane engines, into the Ohio.

Backed into a corner, the teams from Detroit had no choice but to participate in the points race. The winning boat was the Gale IV. The driver was “Wild Bill” Cantrell.

A regatta was born.

Phil Cole(Photo11: Dan Cole, Madison Regatta)

* * *

A regatta is dying. But even if it does, the Madison Regatta will leave a legacy of a thriving town.

Revolutionary War hero John Paul founded Madison in 1809, naming his new settlement after the fourth president of the United States, and made it a mill town on the Ohio River. Commerce followed. So did two railroads, one above ground — work began in 1836 on the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad, the first railroad in Indiana — and the other Underground. Madison’s location just across the river from Kentucky made it a prime destination for slaves seeking freedom, and they often found it courtesy of an abolitionist who owned a local barber shop.

When the nation’s interstate boom bypassed Madison in the 1960s, the small town wasn’t crippled like so many others. It had the Regatta, which was drawing 75,000 or more every year and crested above 100,000 in the early 1980s. Madison remains robust today, with one of the largest National Historic Landmark Districts in the country.

But the Madison Regatta: not robust. Lagging attendance, mounting debt, bad weather … it has been the perfect storm of financial ruin, including the 2013 Regatta that was canceled when rain drove the Ohio River too high.

Enter Dan Cole, 56, a car salesman of three decades whose parents divorced when he was 2, and who has spent the past decade walking purposefully in the footsteps of his mostly missing father. With Phil Cole off working in Nevada or Washington, D.C. or Indianapolis, Dan was left to experience his father by becoming his father.

“I tried to do everything my dad’s done,” he says.

His dad wrote cookbooks and sold them on a Cincinnati TV show in the 1970s; Dan was on a cooking TV show himself, filming the pilot for a reality showed called “Kick Off Cook Off” with Colts stars Adam Vinatieri and Dwight Freeney in 2010 that never saw the airwaves. His dad was the voice of the Madison Regatta for nearly 25 years; Dan has been the PA announcer since 2010.

Now, Dan Cole is running the boat races. Just like his dad. And he’s trying, with the help of a tireless army of 50 or 60 unpaid local volunteers who align their vacation time with the race, to save the Madison Regatta.

“I always wanted to do what my dad did,” he says. “This was just another way, I guess.”

What’s that saying, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs? Dan Cole has broken dozens. He’s his father’s son, remember, and to turn the regatta around he is trying unconventional ways. Unpopular ways, some of them, like shortening the race from 2½ miles to 2 miles, cutting the course short before it reaches the Milton-Madison Bridge.

Dan Cole(Photo11: Dan Cole, Madison Regatta)

“The teams with the money have the equipment,” is how Dan explains it. “The bigger the race course, the guys with better equipment leave everyone in the straightaways. Now (by shortening the straights) we’ll put it into the hands of the driver.”

Cole subscribes to the less-is-more approach. He’s culling the poorest, least competitive teams — hydroplanes are powered by souped-up car engines now, 454s and Hemis mostly — from a field that once featured eight or 10 boats. He's also shortening the Saturday-Sunday racing by three hours. Once a pair of 9-to-5 days, now races will begin at 11 a.m. and end at 4 p.m.

“This year we have four boats only — two-boat match racing with four race-ready competitive teams — and a lot of old folks are against it,” Cole says. “But you have to learn to attract millenials. If you don’t, you’re gonna go by the wayside. We used to have 45-minute breaks between races. We’ll only have 15 minutes of down time this year.”

Cole’s been coming to the races since he was in diapers, and while he’s watched the Indianapolis 500 from under those old trees near Turn 1, he says of the Regatta:

“There’s not a prettier view in sports than those hydroplanes coming around the first turn for a race,” he says. “It’s amazing to see four rockets going 200 miles an hour, side by side.”

How many spectators seeing that view, at $10 or $15 each, would save the Madison Regatta? Cole says 20,000 or 25,000 would do the trick. But it’s out of his hands now. He and his team of volunteers and board members have done what they can do. Now it’s up to the crowd. And the weather. And maybe the man residing under those oak and poplar trees at Springdale Cemetery. Dan Cole asked the old man. And he asked nicely.

“I told my Dad: I need you to help me,” Dan Cole says, and now he’s starting to tear up. “Heaven help me, I hope he will.”